mattlutze

"Explosive growth" and "Virus is largely out of control" is dangerous risk communication.

How often are you updating the data? If there's manual deconfliction, do you clearly indicate how old data for a country or state/province is, or how accurate the reporting is that your massaged summary comes from?

If you're meaning to put this out in the world as a source of information please get some feedback first from people that do this sort of thing for a living. Inaccuracy or excitable language can do more harm than good in emergencies.

I do understand the mathematical thinking you're employing here, and if it were an abstract situation I'd be there with you.

There's a pretty prevalent model for Risk Communication that compares the actual hazard (how bad something will be if it happens) against a person's outrage (how bad a person thinks a thing will be).

When the prevalent authority communicates risk in a way that lowers a person's outrage too low you can get inaction (like a president saying "don't worry" or “I think that whole situation will start working out.")

When the prevalent authority communicates risk in a way that raises a person's outrage (like surprising a population who were told to ignore a situation by then banning travel, closing borders and telling people we don't have testing capacity) you can get very strong reactions.

It's good when outrage matches hazard, that's where we want to be. But when hazard is, say, in the middle, and outrage is raised above that, you can end up with people feeling like they desperately need things.

At this point, they throw whatever money they have to at the things in order to mitigate their perceived hazard, and that's where opportunists and gougers come in. These people aren't acting rationally (they're perceiving a higher hazard than is real) and are vulnerable to ignoring market conditions in that "a free market works when both parties have perfect knowledge" sort of way.

So understanding this, we take actions that kneecap the unrestricted free market, because it doesn't have compassion and we want to be compassionate toward our neighbors that got too freaked out for their own good.

No one should try and take advantage of a vulnerable party, and it's a good thing to have safeguards against that.

Actually I took the gas price bit from specific experience and saw enough examples in a quiet Midwest area growing up to expect my experiences weren’t unique.

The other issue is people, like in the article, just buying up a bunch of stuff so that other people literally can only buy from the opportunist. Consider the battle for concert tickets, which the band might sell for $20 but a scalper would buy and try to resell for $100. Yes it’s technically possible, but it’s fine for a society to determine it’s better for everyone if you’re not allowed to take advantage of people’s needs or vulnerabilities like that (when it comes to health supplies, for example).

Price gouging is the supply side artificially raising prices significantly above normal to take advantage of a temporary imbalance in the anxiety vs actual threat being experienced by the demand side.

The day congress declares war on Iran, if you significantly raise fuel prices at your gas station but the wholesale supply hasn't changed, you're generally trying to take advantage of the consumer's fear.

We're for some reason cool with this in the financial markets, but for tangible consumer goods like food and fuel it's (rightly) considered predatory and criminally anti-social. Unchecked gouging can lead to real and dangerous social destabilization.

Well, as a counterpoint, imagine how much time could be saved if you were able to recall from memory not just the most-used functions that you need for a problem, but the next level down of sometimes or rarely used ones. Or for patterns, or for other such things that can be simplified down into memorizable / recallable blocks.

Regularly looking things up is ok, but actively re-experiencing the thing you're trying to learn is a better way to make it stick.

We're discussing this because he went and spoke at a public forum, and gave his expertise as foundation for why his speech should be influential. That can indeed be confused, and his obtuseness with not modifying his statements after multiple requests by the licensing organization would indicate that he meant this to stand.

The public are not experts on all things. Someone ignorant to the stages of licensing are likely to hear "I studied engineering and work as an engineer" and think, "I can trust this person with topics related to engineering." This used to happen, to undesirable effect, which is why calling yourself "an engineer" especially in civil engineering fields requires a license.

If this person is bright, capable, and has your trust, you’d likely do well to bring him on.

You may be surprised what someone can get done in 3 days a week. You’ll have a as well a grateful employee, who it sounds like has a range of interests (this May mean even more critical thinking and solution creativity for you).

Also, it’s at least been my experience, that when we grow out of really small teams, it can take a while to define really well what a role should look like. This is further then an opportunity to test this 4th employee role without paying for downtime during that definition phase.

And who knows, maybe he falls in love with your project even more after he starts and you can re-approach full time work in the heat future.

Your description of his description is easily confused with him saying he’s an Engineer.

That’s a licensed position when you’re providing services to the public.

I think we’re desensitized by the software industry’s tendency to use the term for developers and technicians. “Software engineer” is not the same thing as an Engineer in the civil or electrical trade, for example.

The Professional Engineer title in much of the United States is an additional level of credentialing and is more rigorous than just completing an undergraduate degree in an engineering field (though I guess some areas let you qualify with years of regular demonstrable experience).

The Engineer license came up particularly to address quality control in civil engineering works [1]. So it's actually important to protect that, lest a bunch of folks start deciding they're qualified to give opinions on complicated structures or earthworks.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_and_licensure_in_en...

Self-driving features are indeed being demonstrated to be safer. The video was talking about the different levels of self-driving so maybe we can agree to discuss it on that spectrum.

Tesla publishes some information [1]. I think the others do too. (Take your requisite grains of salt, I work at Tesla.) The the self-driving features are helping reduce accident rates.

I get being skeptical of cars driving for you. I think we should also be concerned with the bad choices that fully fledged human drivers make, how emotions they don't control (or situations they put themselves in) can exacerbate those choices, and how often those things result in damage, injury or loss of life.

1: https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

Cars driving themselves means less people die on the roads. The self-driving features that are in existing fleets of cars are demonstrating this.

That's the humanist point that is being missed, and running "this is all a scam" videos when Hotz isn't even saying that seems disingenuous.

As the self-driving tech industry gets better at checking off the edge cases, I truly hope people stay open to evolving how we see transportation and the benefits it'll bring.

Having a bunch of people and things to move around is a good reason for a vehicle, because you're using it. Being a single occupant in a midsized something filling up roads is what folks are generally concerned with first.

Congestion is a big issue and until cars are 0 emissions, putting more on the road will bring more pollution. It will also mean building more roads, which further increases our environmental impact.

Best to both improve that through regulation and industry response, and actively work on expanding multi-modal mass transit options. The goal should still be fewer cars overall along with fantastically desirable other transport options -- we should (in a good way) want you to be disappointed when you have to get in your car instead of taking the mass transit options.

The barrier to expansion is that suburban sprawly cities have been designed around cars, shared transportation under-developed, and wealthy folks are scared of being too close to less wealthy folks, who they think will try and steal their stuff or cough on them.

Relatively rich, conservative suburban folks are going to make choices to disadvantage less-wealthy people (like those that are historically going to need public transport and can't afford a car, or a second at least). It's easy to raise a group of people's outrage through scare rhetoric; that's why we the US has it's current administration. It's also not a good reason to just say "oh well buy more cars".

The user notes it prominently in their profile.

There is an account profile in which you can write these things, if you're feeling like qualifying your comments is too onerous.

In order for Cloudflare (or anyone) to be a part of this program they have to comply with a particular set of rules.

Limiting data. Your DNS data can reveal a lot of sensitive information about you, and currently DNS providers aren’t subject to any limits on what they can do with that data; we want to change that. Our policy requires that your data will only be used for the purpose of operating the service, must not be retained for longer than 24 hours, and cannot be sold, shared, or licensed to other parties.

Yes, governments can secret around this with intelligence orders, just like they can do with any of the ISPs that will keep all of the data indefinitely instead of for 24 hours.

One of the hallmarks of science fiction is building metaphors about the human condition and cultural phenomena in the world that the author creates.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244017723690 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/215824401772369... https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/1339122 https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol13/iss1/5/

> Losing control of our data was unacceptable, as was paying for a tool that was not part of our core offering for the CERN community; therefore, we will end the trial of this platform.

It seems that they were pretty open about the reasons they dropped Workplace and suggested Mattermost and Discourse as replacements.

Have you seen any official discussion of the data being made available?

I feel like, for example, I'd be worried if fine-detail GPS data was being published live for example, or live enough to predict where the plane is "right" now...

If there's anyone in the air control technology industry here, I'm curious what parts of this change get you really excited, and which parts get you really nervous?

How are you approaching your product in a way that discourages your company from morphing it into a money manager that upsells your users credit cards or loan products?

Lots of RFPs are awarded to companies with existing commercial technology, or to solution providers who bid on a plan to integrate open-source software and maybe add a little flavor.

I've had a Pine64 in my closet for years from the original Kickstarter and completely forgot about it.

Now I've got a fun project for the weekend :)

> That's a sloppy statement. You haven't defined what standard.

Actually, I think I established a basis of discussion then later illustrated this basis with the way HN has grown and tends to enforce its standard.

> A "rhetor" is a teacher of rhetoric. This is not the correct word in this case.

A rhetor is a person practicing rhetoric, or a person delivering persuasive or effective communication. Teachers are indeed a subset of that, but also public speakers, negotiators, and e.g. authors who write to influence their audiences' understanding or perception.

I think you may also misunderstand the function of ethos in rhetoric.

> A knowledgeable audience can decide whether to trust something based on the actual content.

Perhaps we're in agreement? If the content reflects reflects clear understanding it can improve the efficacy of a rhetorical artifact, while sloppiness can reduce its persuasiveness.

Errors can diminish ethos. Correcting errors can amplify it: https://jacobbuckman.com/2020-01-17-a-sober-look-at-bayesian...

Work also needs to be decoupled from inner city offices (so you don't have to go into the city/office/etc) and local and regional legislation needs to be enacted in concert to lower overall personally operated vehicle density.

Easily scheduled, ubiquitous micro-buses or other vehicle form factors may change the 20th century compulsion of having to have your own private car.

Self-driving car networks have the benefit of not being bound by the same finite capacity of a network of humans trying to manage real-world traffic.

Neither would they have to operate at artificially handicapped speeds, as no human operator would really be able to keep up regardless with the 10,000 or 100,000 cars running around.

Part of reacting and mitigating acute issues is being able to reroute traffic early enough, or slow cars down early enough, to minimize disruption (instead of a traffic slinky blocking everyone up).

There's no reason so far here that self-driving vehicles can't improve traffic and overall throughput, and it's a bold claim to declare L5 dead on arrival.

There's lots of reasons for congestion existing.

https://www.geotab.com/blog/traffic-congestion/

Given the same number of cars on the road, a self-driving fleet would eliminate many mechanical failures and many human failures, and be able to adapt to sub-optimal infrastructure at a network-wide level.

Infrastructure would also be easier or more efficient to improve, because you'd have removed much of the human variability that makes identifying choke points difficult.

Reactionary legislation is a risk to the industry.

There's a fantastic amount of value in cities and urban areas. Self-driving cars can work as a massive network to reduce or eliminate congestion and give people back hundreds of millions of hours spent stuck in traffic.

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/22/us/traffic-commute-gridlo...

They can also, if Level 5 becomes a thing, reduce traffic collisions. And if they all end up electric, through route optimization they can significantly reduce energy consumption requirements for vehicle usage.